Top 5 Reasons Why You Should Treat the Environment Well

This post is my contribution to Blog Action Day. The issue for this year is environment.

If you read your RSS reader today, you may read a lot of posts about the environment. That’s because there are 15,000+ blogs participating in Blog Action Day which cover the theme of environment.

Since there will surely be a ton of post on what to do and how to do it regarding our environment, in this post I’d like to handle the question of why we should treat the environment well in the first place. A strong answer to why will give us the necessary motivation to do our best to save the planet.

Why should we care about the environment? Isn’t that the responsibility of some foundations or government agencies? No, of course not. The environment is the responsibility of each individual on this planet. Each of us should do our best to preserve the environment and save the planet. Here are some reasons why you should treat the environment well:

1. It reflects your personality

Just as the way you treat other people reflects your personality, the way you treat the environment reflects who you actually are. Can you say that you are a responsible person if you treat the environment carelessly? I don’t think so. A good person will treat the environment responsibly. So treat the environment well and prove that you indeed have good personality.

2. It is a way to give to your generation

You will be happier in life if you focus on giving rather than receiving, and treating the environment well is one way to give to the others in your generation. By treating the environment well, you make this planet a better place to live in for everyone. You help yourself and other people have higher quality of life.

3. It is a way to give to the future generations

Not only treating the environment well benefits you and other people in current generation, it will also benefit people in many generations to come. This planet is our legacy to the future generations. What kind of legacy are we going to give to them? Will we give them a worse planet than the one we inherit from previous generations?

4. It is a way to give back to the planet

Whether we realize it or not, we can only live by consuming resources provided by this planet. Take energy for example. We can get the energy we need to support our lifestyle only by consuming resources like oil and coal provided by the earth. This is not to mention basic needs like food and water. If we have received so much from this planet, can’t we do something to give back to it? Treating the environment responsibly is a way to give back to the planet.

5. It prevents the doomsday scenario

I learn one thing from the book Collapse by Jared Diamond: many civilizations come to an end because they do not treat their environment responsibly. They exhaust the resources provided by the environment without ever realizing it until it’s too late. This pattern happened over and over again throughout the history.

Will we let such pattern occur again in our generation? I hope not: if such collapse happens in this age, the consequences would be much more severe than the ones in previous generations. The reason is globalization. In the past, the collapses happened only to local communities. But now, thanks to the globalization, practically the whole world is connected as single system. The collapse may then affect the entire planet. It’s a doomsday scenario. If that happens, there might be a post-human era on planet earth.

16 Comments

  1. […] Remembering why we are trying the save our Earth sometimes becomes lost in all of the how-to’s. See what Life Optimizer has to say in their post, Top 5 Reasons Why You Should Treat the Environment Well. […]

  2. This is great. I found it to be very informative

  3. helped me im doing this for a school work

  4. apeksha ginodia
    apeksha ginodia

    We should care for the environment coz’ we need to handover a healthy environment to our future generations………..

  5. isn’t it too late for that?

  6. DO PEOPLE TREAT THE ENVIRONMENT GOOD IN THE MIDWEST
    > :<

  7. @577cdc547989014b502ca29925262bb7:disqus
    Thank you so much. This really did help me for my speech. I think, your wise opinions will definitely change and impact the world. Thanks!

  8. it doesn’t help even a little

  9. this helps for science project thx

  10. Didn’t really help but thanks anyway ????????????????

  11. It does help for homework thank you ????

  12. It helped me in many ways…… thnx for the info

Comments are closed.